Dear Pottery Barn,

Please stop.

Lately you've been hurting my eyes, and I think it's time for an intervention. You've always been the bastion of safe shopping. It used to be an indecisive young lady, such as myself, could wander into your store and buy anything-- confident that while it may not be exciting, revolutionary, or the hallmark of modern design, it would at least last several seasons without offending anyone's design sensibilities. You took us suburban moms into your brushed-canvas rolled arms and said, "It's OK, I'm a slip cover. You can wash me after I'm peed and puked on." And so we bought you. And we were happy.

I admit to turning a blind eye when I saw this oceanic lovely lampooned on Decorno. Just a little design hiccup, I thought, clearly the product of a long, gray winter.

And then today, while innocently scanning your site for rugs and decorative pillows I find THIS.


Pottery Barn, how could you? More importantly, what the??? A herd of elephants? On a pillow? Mind you, elephants are my favorite animal ever and I still find this egregious conduct on your part. Will you soon be accepting pictures of our pets so you can machine-weave them into throws for our sofas? Please advise. If so, I can have one made up of the kids for my 87 year old grandmother.

Let's take it one step further and go over the copy, shall we?

Incorporating photography into furnishings brings a fresh look to a room. (False.) Printed with a highly realistic ink-jet technique ("Things Remembered."), our photoreal pillow captures the image of an elephant herd in espresso tones (The color of dung.). Printed on smooth cotton canvas and backed with espresso textural linen. (This pillow is rougher than an elephant's ass.)

Demonic Pottery Barn, I rebuke you! Go back to the fiery bowels of bad design from which you crawled and let the original, safe, Pottery Barn do it's job. From this point forward I expect to see canvas slipcovers, the color red, hurricane candle shades, and a smattering of starfish in the summer and reindeer in the winter. No exceptions.

I trust we won't need to have this discussion again.

Regards,
Jules